Thursday, September 3, 2015

Tinsel and the Torture-Net Artifice

I

The photographs that
follow are patently not “authentic,” nor indeed are they photographs.Both are fictional devices set in place to
give the fiction itself the veneer of authenticity.As far as characterization is concerned, the
villains are pantomime cut-outs, and the hero’s only attributes are strength,
good looks, compassion, and moral principles that prompt him to take a stand
against injustice.That is as
complicated as it gets.The hero, pitted
against ever more morally corrupt antagonists and placed in ever more tangled
and ambiguous situations, remains impossibly strong.You know the type:you might even, in your more honest moments,
detect a strain of it in yourself.He
delights in “doubling.”The medium can
turn things into language and language into a thing.Mirages, hollow signs of the heat-glow, are
taken for objects and people; objects and people are taken for mirages.The casting and consuming of voices are
sometimes done by mouths and ears alone, but mostly they are done through
technology.He has no past, no sexual
identity, no complexities.Their real
content may still remain invisible, hiding in the light.

II

The argument may seem
stunningly naïve.Things are never that
neat and tidy.Politics is present, but
it is treated with disdain.What could
they have to tell him about the revolution anyway?All it has meant for them is a change of name
on the placard beside their hovels and of the uniform worn by the police who
swing their truncheon at them.Friendship may bring about emotional awakening and cultural
enlightenment, but politically it brings cynicism.The authority may be grounded in the divine,
but it is established and consolidated through technology.Terrified at first, he eventually digs up the
floorboards and finds a record player.The
holy world of spirits collapses once we see the mechanisms at work behind
it.But overall these are rearguard
actions in a larger losing battle.The
enforcers of the prohibition law get drunk.Blood falls from the animals not as a libation, but rather “to be made
into I don’t know what—food, drugs, jewels, explosives.”Sometimes the interruptions are innocuous;
sometimes they are not.Full and empty
spectacle make move and counter-move against one another, but the empty wins
out in the long run.Too right.

III

He seems drawn to these
places like a dowser’s stick to subterranean water.Even spaces not designed for burial turn into
tombs when he steps into them.At best
this relationship is fraught; at worst it goes disastrously wrong.In whose name?Whose legacy demands this?The secret, once more, has been disguised in
a name and transplanted across the world to throw its pursuers off the fact
that it was right at home the whole time.This is the pattern set by the crypt, pulsed out in its coded
broadcasts.To keep it safe he buries it
inside his crypt and carries it around for all his life, showing and hiding it,
saying it without saying it.Radio
messages shuttle back and forth:from
rocket to moon-surface to ground control and back again.Here, too, time zones are overlaid.Here, too, the sun is intensely
scrutinized.Here, too, is
abandonment.We should learn something
from this.What?Who knows where the signals will end up, or
what they will end up meaning?

IV

Let’s believe this for
now. It is as though language, like the
microphone, were shying away from the message it is carrying.The relations here are complex, to say the
least.Those who can discern the rhythms
can step into them and operate in their blind spots.In his zone of near-silence, he injects
language into a flower.It is
constructed with a rocket scientist’s skill for routing, plotting elliptical
paths of departure and return.It stacks
up layers of meaning like so many pancakes, toy bricks, sheets of acetate.And yet, as they were last time, they will be
disappointed.The event field is
unconsummated; and language fails to deliver.The voice that carries the secret remains inaudible even as it is
amplified.It may terrorize the heroes,
burn their ears, but it stops short of destroying their world by naming the
event as event.The scene is ridiculous and totally
implausible.This stage set sacrifices
him on its hollow altar, leaving him trapped inside an empty, perforated
drum.Naming him, her voice removes his
name.Perhaps she is not wrong.

V

Let’s start where we
left off:he is killed.What happens next?What became of the original we do not find
out.The home he returns to was not the
home heleft.These gifts are all poisoned,
booby-trapped.He may get away with it,
but its specter will haunt his line for generations.Their departures and returns follow the path
of time.It is in his blood.He must sweat it, because even animals pick
it up.While doing this, he is hit by a
car.“My good deed for the day,” he
tells himself.They decline, but he
insists.The volcano eventually erupts,
blowing into the sky a column of smoke more than thirty thousand feet
high.Their memories of it have been
absolutely wiped, erased.Where is this
new detour through secrets and sunflowers leading us?My artifice is as good as nature.My artifice is better than nature, he is saying now.For him, everything is a copy.What lies at its core?

VI

This process is dark,
sometimes shocking, in many respects catastrophic.It is certainly sad.When there is duplication, comedy
results.A person being manipulated like
an automaton by another person is funny.Repetition takes place in the field of time.Here, though, the fall has become more than
simply a pratfall.Time and again he
turns his head to tell people to look where they are going and then crashes
into whatever is in his path.That he is
always falling, relapsing, messing up, is a sign of his awkward relationship
not only with the material world but also with the divine one.Gravity, like repetition, opens up the
dimension of time.In comedy this option
is removed.An awareness of one’s own
fakeness can have disastrous consequences.The meeting was never going to happen.Eventually, it gets played out in the field of art, the most
self-conscious of all environments.To
turn water into wine would be a miracle.Some peace and quiet to smoke his pipe would be nice.

VII

Even when parchments
have been overlaid and treasure unearthed, significant portions of it remain
uncovered.It divides into three parts
which circulate through time and space.This is more than simply an extended plot device, of course.“Tomorrow I shall be famous!” he cries.What about his other descendants?He had three sons.This is extremely dubious practice, to say
the least.All literature is
pirated.Every act of reading is its own
kind of remaking of a work.The second
scene moves at a quicker pace.